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Magazine

Warships in France by Photographer Bob Thissen

Bob Thissen is an animator, filmmaker and photographer and he loves to travel. He has been traveling the world looking for unique abandoned buildings and yards and since 2007 he takes his camera with him to document what he finds. However, just documenting these places soon wasn't enough. Bob wanted to show us their beauty and tragedy and started taking more and more care in the way he captured the images.
It's the adrenaline, adventure and experience that drives him to go to these places, but once there he wants to leave us, the viewer, with a feeling of "wow". And I think you'll agree that he is doing a pretty good job so far.

We received this gallery from Bob featuring some awesome abandoned warships in France.

These abandoned warships are definitely in my top 10 explores.
It’s a real adventure. My first visit dates from 2011 when we had to crawl through the mud and to swim to these warships against the strong current. Some ships were easy to enter, for other ones you needed to climb on the anchors to get onboard. Also getting inside involved hours of searching. The explore wasn’t made easier due regular patrolling of the naval police, marine and a special team that protect the ships. We had a few close calls.
I have visited 7 big French warships and a few small ones.The most impressive one was the “Cruiser Colbert” She served the navy from 1956 to 1991. After that she was turned into a museum. Due an expensive paintjob of 500.000 euros she got abandoned since 2007 and got scrapped in 2016.